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It's been a busy week for the Team Fortress team. That's right: the police are here again. We're on a first name basis with them, the fire department and the nasal extraction emergency response team at Overlake Hospital by now, so it was like meeting with old friends.
Anyway, seems like a Team Fortress staffer went missing this week, so they need to poke around the office a bit and see if they can find out where he went. While I was poking around the missing staffer's PC looking for evidence to erase, I stumbled on a game production diary it looked like he'd been writing, and figured why not throw it up on the TF blog? Enjoy!
My first day at Valve working with the Team Fortress 2 team. Pretty excited! TF2 is my all-time favorite game, and I just know I'm due for big things here.
Robin Walker showed me around the office and explained that Valve has a "flat management" style, meaning that nobody's in charge of anybody.
"And I'm the MOST not in charge of everybody," he said, cocking a thumb at himself. "I fired everybody at the company once. I could fire you and not even break a sweat."
I laughed at this, then looked around and saw everybody else not laughing. I trailed off.
"He really did fire everybody," Corey Peters said.
"Then he bought a horse," Dario Casali added.
Robin laughed warmly at these memories as he fed sugar cubes to his horse. "This is your desk," he added. He didn't point anywhere or look at anything besides the horse.
"The horse is my desk," I said for clarification. Robin looked at me like I was some kind of idiot, then pointed to a tiny desk under the horse.
All in a all, a big first day. Pretty sure I'll fit in fine around here. Robin's already given me a nickname: Big Face. Wasn't sure what that meant. Robin explained that I had a big face, in his estimation.
Also, note to self: buy a hat. I seem to be the only person not wearing one.
TUESDAY, APRIL 6th, 2010
Noticed that everyone's wearing different hats than they were yesterday. Robin asked where my hat was. I said I didn't have one yet. Got really quiet in the office all of a sudden. I added that I'd probably buy one this weekend. Could be wrong, but I swear I heard someone whisper "terrorist."
Big team meeting today. I came prepared. I've been programming a playable demo version of TF2 with an entirely new tenth class. I had to teach myself programming, modeling, level design, character design and about twenty other skills, but I think the results speak for themselves. Everybody took a crack at playing it.
"This is pretty balanced gameplay," admitted Robin.
"I like how we haven't found any hats yet," said Brandon Reinhart. "It sets up the suspense better. I'm all, 'When am I going to find a hat already?'" Everyone laughed.
"I hope it's soon, I can't wait much longer," said Corey Peters. "Look how stupid this tenth class's bare head looks!" More big laughs.
"Actually, there aren't any hats in this demo," I said, chuckling. Deathly silence. Then everybody got up at once and stopped playing. Eric Smith got really mad and threw his keyboard through a wall, then stormed out and went home. Robin asked to speak to me privately.
"I don't think you're applying yourself enough," he said.
"But I invented an entirely new class from scratch," I said, feeling my face get hot.
"Yeah, that's really, really..." he trailed off, so bored with the sentence he didn't bother to finish it. "Look, maybe you should read this. You know--help you get into the 'Team Fortress' mindset."
He slid over a well-worn game design manual. I leafed through it. It wasn't a game design manual, it was a coffee table-sized book of women wearing hats.
Mistaking my confusion for interest, Robin excitedly pulled his chair over to me, and looked over my shoulder. "Would you look at that hat," he whispered, pointing to a lady in a wide-brimmed hat. "Gorgeous."
"Are you crying?" I asked, because that's sure what it looked like he was doing.
"What? No. I just had something in my eye."
"Okay," I said. It was pretty easy to see what he had in his eye, though. Tears.
Robin suddenly jumped up and took everybody hat shopping. I tried working in the empty office for a while, then decided to just go home.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7th, 2010
All work suspended so the TF2 team could spend the morning modeling their hats. Brandon Reinhart won Best in Show for his calfskin sombrero. (I thought it looked ridiculous.)
After lunch it was back to work, and Robin outlined the next six months of objectives for the team. I noticed the word "hat" coming up a lot. Like in all the objectives, for instance. And a couple of times, it looked like he got distracted and just wrote "hat".
"Question in the back?" said Robin, pointing to my outstretched arm.
"Yeah," I said. "What the hell is wrong with you people?" Twenty-odd faces turned to me. "You could be designing anything you want! You could be coming up with new levels and game modes and weapons and--and--and all you do is sit around making hats!"
A hushed silence. I started to think I might have gotten through to some of them. Brandon Reinhart, especially, looked at me with a newfound sense of wonder.
"You know, guys," said Brandon, "the new guy would make a great hat if we hollowed him out."
Nods of agreement. Then, as one, they leapt up and advanced on me.
I woke up in a janitorial closet. I guess this is some hazing ritual on the new guy. I want to believe that, anyway. But now I'm starting to wonder if Brandon's sombrero was calfskin after all.
Hmm. Actually, now I remember this guy. Brandon, you might want to hide that beret for a few days until the police leave.
We're shipping a quick update to clean up some of the confusion around the 119th Update badges. We initially chose to calculate which badge to give players based on the beta release of TF2, because that was the date that customers could first play TF2. This turns out to have been a mistake, largely because many players did the math and thought they were getting something other than what they ended up with. So to remove that confusion, this new update moves that date forward to the official retail release of TF2, the 10th October 2007, and reissues updated badges to anyone who would be affected by that date shift.
We also felt it was still important to reward those who were there on the first moment TF2 went live, and helped us by beta testing prior to release. So we've added a new "Primeval Warrior" badge, which will replace the badge of anyone who purchased TF2 prior to the official release date.
On a quick side note, we've been having fun watching QuickActionTF2's movies, which inspired Community Fortress's Moments of Glory. If you haven't seen the latest one, it's worth it just for knoxxx's awesome move. It's also a great way to brush up on your french.
Today marks the 119th (or so) update to Team Fortress 2.
We think that calls for a celebration.
To coincide with today's update, we are pleased to announce that our friends at The IP Factory will be releasing a limited edition collector's statue of the Heavy, which is the first in their 12 inch Team Fortress 2 line of collectible statues. The Heavy will come in both BLU and RED team versions and numbers are strictly limited.
The IP Factory will begin accepting Heavy statue pre-orders on Monday 3rd May 9.00am.
To grab a sneak peak of the Heavy statue in all of his glory visit their website at www.gamingheads.com.
Today we're shipping some significant changes to the item drop system.
What are the net effects of these changes? Here's the quick summary:
We're still thinking about how to allow you to influence your drops. When we see discussions on the forums, people often ask why we don't tie it to some in-game performance (like your scoreboard position, or number of kills, etc). Many players understand that if we did this, idle servers would simply change into servers running plugins that generate those in-game events frequently (as we saw in the Soldier & Demoman WAR!).
There's another side of it that we care about just as much, which is the message it would send to all the players who don't want to idle. Any in-game performance metric we chose would result in there being specific maps, classes, tactics, and so on that resulted in more drops. We really don't want that to happen. When it's simply playtime, you're free to play the game however you like. If you love Payload, you can play Payload maps without worrying about whether you're earning less drops than the guys playing Arena maps. Community mapmakers don't have to worry about whether their maps earn item drops fast enough. Similarly, server operators can configure their servers however they like, without worrying about reducing the rate at which their players are earning drops. In short, while it's far from perfect, not tying to in-game performance is a lot less poisonous to your minute-to-minute game experience.
At Valve, we like to play games made by other people, mainly because a) we don't have to make them, and b) they're generally more fun than ours anyway. In particular, games made by other people don't have Pyros named Eric Smith, who makes our collective lives miserable on a daily basis in playtests. (If you ever wonder why features like "Pyro now gets assists for airblasting enemies into environmental hazards" keep getting added to the game, thank Eric. Not content with killing us by just holding down W+M1, he persists in finding bold new ways to get points by any means necessary.)
It turns out that not only do we play other games--other game developers play ours. Last year Telltale Games' TF2 Team went head to head with us in the TF2 Studio Rumble tournament, in the process dominating our own Adrian Finol so hard that he made up an excuse about "picking up my kids somewhere" and went and sat in his car for an hour. After the match, we all agreed that one of these days we should do something cool together, because they're big fans of TF2, and we're big fans of getting advance copies of Sam & Max episodes.
Fast forward to now, and doodly-doodly-doot: We're doing something cool together. To celebrate the release of The Penal Zone, the first episode in Sam & Max's new adventure, The Devil's Playhouse, the Telltale team has provided us with some awesome TF2 items. We're going to give them out to everyone who buys The Penal Zone in the next week.
That's right: one week only. It's like the Soldier medal all over again, except this time you have no excuse about being too asleep in bed to download it in time. The items:
Max's Severed Head
